


Like Some Man Made of Tin

by Zetared



Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 16:44:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10194200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: Cybernetics are delicate things. So are human hearts. Go figure.Goes a wee bit AU at the end of Episode 5.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: I know nothing about human anatomy or 99% of Borderlands lore. This fic was an abandoned WIP, but I threw a rushed ending on it to call it good. I may expand on this universe, someday, if I get the TftB bug again.

When Hyperion first offered him the upgrades--a benefit package for exceptional services rendered--Rhys hadn’t wavered for a minute. In a cutthroat company like Hyperion, cybernetic enhancements provided an edge that some people would kill for. Rhys himself would have given an arm and a leg for that edge. In the end, it’d only cost him an arm and an eye. (The pain had been...bad. He’d forgotten how much the prosthetics had hurt, at first. He remembers it now with stunning clarity, finding the pain even worse now that the devices are gone).

Vaughn and Yvette had worried, especially the first week or so after the installation. He hadn’t wanted to take any sick time, terrified that such a display of weakness would cost him all the brownie-points the implants had earned him and then some. Rhys had spent most of his first day back reeling, his mind rebelling at the total overwhelming deluge of data being transmitted to his brain. He’d felt seasick and scattered, unable to so much as keep his balance without serious concentration. (Now, the wreckage of the Helios tilts and whirls in a parody of that same vertigo; he stumbles and falls against a broken metal beam. The motion jars the open socket of his shoulder, and he experiences a strange sort of mental white noise--like the static when a hack goes bad.)

He’d gotten used to it. He stopped looking twice at himself in the mirror, surprised by the glint of blue. He stopped experiencing the phantom pains down his forearm, stopped wondering obsessively just what, exactly, the company had done to his discarded flesh-and-bone limb. He adapted, as always. After a while, he couldn’t even remember what it had been like, before a good quarter of his physical makeup was comprised of metal bits and wires. (He thinks he’s going to die. He can’t possibly have much more blood in him to lose. There’s a giant, sucking black hole in his field of vision. He keeps expecting to see lights, numbers, that comfortingly consistent stream of digital feedback of before. He feels empty. His brain is so quiet, released from Jack--thank God; never meet your heroes--but also bereft of everything else, too. He wonders, fleetingly, if he has sacrificed too much, this time. The Helios heaves a shaky breath. Something heavy falls to his left, causing the ground to tremble. He propels himself forward with longer strides, clutching his shoulder and reflexively closing the lid over his broken eye.) 

 

Yeah, he had really been going places, once. (He has to move.)

\--

It’s a weird combination of determination and luck that saves him. He trades his boots to a stranger for a medical kit and spends a good hour teaching himself how to make the damn thing work. Finally, he’s left with a scarred, red-raw stretch of flesh over once-exposed joint and nerve. The skin is numb and rough and, honestly, really gross. He’s not bleeding out anymore, though, so he takes it as a win, despite the fact that his beloved socks are now nothing more than ribbons.

He presses onward toward the Atlas Dome. It’s the only thing he can think of to do, going forward. He has to go forward. That’s what he’s always done.

\--

The Quick Change has more options than Rhys expects. He picks an outfit all in black and tries to ignore the echo of Jack in his head that mocks him for it. The suit feels right for what he plans to become next. CEOs have to look the part--he learned that much from Hyperion, even if all its other lessons now seem suspect. 

\--

He sleeps in the Atlas facility. His dreams are strange, troubled things. As a kid, he used to dream in black and white. After the implants, he dreamed in vibrant colors and swarming binary code. Now, he dreams of grayscale people with static instead of faces and every corner of his dreamscape burns with neon afterimages, dizzying to behold. 

He opens his eyes (er, eye) and sees a flat world that reveals to him absolutely nothing. It’s scarier than he would have expected, like a unique kind of blindness. He feels...lost. He also feels hungry. The fruit this place grows is damn good, but a man can only eat so much drakefruit before he wants to hurl.

\--

He replaces the eye, first. Atlas doesn’t have much in the way of cybernetics research--that was always more in Hyperion’s line--but there’s enough, at least, to build a few prototypes. Rhys is good with machines, but it’s harder without the datastream. He digs deeper and deeper into what feels like thousands of old Atlas records, hunting down the knowledge he needs via the terminals in the Dome. It’s a process that once would have taken mere minutes with his upgrades, stretched out into endless hours, and the lag depresses him.

His first prototype eye explodes. It’s dramatic and messy and terrifying--he’s glad he tested the device on the table instead of inside his skull. After that, he gets more cautious, which slows him down even more. 

His hair grows long and shaggy, and he wastes a day trying to cut it in a decent shape. He misses his old life more fiercely than ever in those moments, hacking away at clumps of hair with a pair of cumbersome pruning shears--the closest thing to proper scissors he can find. He never realized, before, how difficult it is to do even the most menial of tasks with only one hand. The end result is bad. He gets better at it, over time.

He gets headaches. He tries not to think about why. Once, he had a delicate spiderwebbing of tiny conductive wires that rested gently in place over specific lobes of his brain. Then he got the bright idea of carving himself up like so much roast meat and yanking the web out. He’s damaged. Duh. He’s lucky he’s not dead. He tries to hold on to the silver lining of that particular dark cloud, but the more burnt out, blown up faux eyes he tosses in the bin, the harder it is to stay positive.

Then, one unremarkable morning, he clicks the last port into place and closes up the rigid white chassis and plugs in the battery and...and his makeshift workroom fills up with a fierce, golden glow.

Crying hurts, so he doesn’t. But it’s a near thing.

\--

The arm is...impossible.

Even if he had the proper technical know-how, which he emphatically does not, to build such a complicated piece with only one working hand is, well. Impossible.

Rhys lays his head on his desk and barely resists the urge to scream out in his frustration. He used to scream like that a lot, but these days elevated blood pressure makes him whoozy. Instead, he closes his eyes and thinks about the Good Old Days. (Most of Rhys’s adult life has been pretty intense and crazy, so there’s not actually a ton of days to go around.)

He thinks about Fiona and Sasha and Vaughn a lot. He hopes they’re okay. He thinks, maybe, he should have gone to find them, first, instead of hightailing it to Atlas. There’s a part of him, though, that is scared of what he might find out. He thinks it’s possible they’re all dead. He wouldn’t be able to live with that. And he has to live. He’s going to take over Atlas. He’s going to build it into something...something….

Well. He hasn’t quite figured that part out, yet. Whatever it is, though, has to be good. He has a lot to atone for.

A week later, while digging through the Atlas archives, he finds records of a stash of Atlas helper-bots stored in a shed a mile from the Dome. He sets up three of the five ‘bots and puts them to work immediately. None of them have very advanced AIs, so they are no good for conversation, but the biggest of the lot is a table-top ‘bot with articulated digits. Suddenly, Rhys has two hands, again--or, at least...close enough. He names the robot “Thumbs,” as in “all thumbs,” and just hopes it doesn’t break anything irreplaceable. 

\--

One morning, Rhys wakes up...and he can’t move. The paralysis is short lived (definitely shorter than Vaughn’s had been, poor guy), but the experience is terrifying, all the same. Rhys abandons the hopeless arm project (he calls it Operation Handyman) and instead turns his attention to calibrating the eye implant to perform internal diagnostics. It’s not a feature his old ECHO Eye had, but this eye is something new. He could probably patent it, actually--the first product from the new, improved Atlas. It’s not a pearl-handled gun or anything, but still pretty cool, if Rhys does say so himself.

The results the eye spits out are...less cool. The scans of Rhys’s brain remind him of the gooey remnants of Vazquez’s exploded body. Solid enough in places, but so much mincemeat in others. He can track the drag of the neural implant’’s wires with the naked eye. There are long, ragged lines of empty blackness in his brain. He gets a little shocky, after that, and has to take a break. 

Over the days following, Rhys builds himself a brand new kind of implant, using Atlas medical templates as a basis for the prototype. There’s no opportunity for testing this one out before implementation--he can’t test it properly unless it's already installed. It’s probably the stupidest decision he’s ever made (that’s saying a lot), but either way, the risks are high. He has to repair the damage his recklessness caused. Otherwise, says the scans from his Atlas Eye, he’s going to start experiencing seizures. 

And then he’s going to die. 

\--

Thumbs needs constant input from its operator in order to carry out its tasks. Rhys spends a few precious hours writing lines of code that will allow Thumbs to operate on fewer direct commands, but he doesn’t have the time to program the ‘bot to be completely autonomous. As a result, Rhys has to be awake for the installation. 

It, in a word, sucks. In several words, it’s the worst thing he’s ever experienced in his life (again, saying a lot). 

His skull makes a truly gruesome sound as Thumbs drills through the gaping uplink port in his temple and into his brain. Thank God for Atlas scientists and their hooky medical garbage, though. Rhys may be awake, but he’s also high as Helios used to be, and he feels intense pressure instead of agonizing pain. The sensation of blood trickling down over his ear, though, is impossible to ignore. The smell is even worse, and if he lets himself think too much about how filthy and definitely NOT sterile the Dome is, he’s going to barf. He absolutely cannot barf while Thumbs has its, well, thumbs in his head.

Rhys walks Thumbs through the process with exacting slowness. He’s learned infinite patience during his time in Atlas. Sometimes, work just has to be slow to be good. He never, ever would have learned such a virtue in Hyperion. Hell, who knows how differently his life could be now if he’d ever had anything approaching patience in his life before. 

He pauses, takes a breath, reminds himself of what he’s doing. He can’t afford any distraction. He has to do this right.

The implant is small, smooth, and spherical. Thumbs can just barely keep a hold of it between two of its digits. Rhys is glad that, for all that it’s clumsy and low-tech, the robot has very thin, careful fingers. Thumbs inserts the implant just as Rhys orders. Rhys’s legs twitch of their own volition as it clicks into place. Must be near his motor cortex. It won’t be staying there, if it all goes right. 

It’s got to root in his prefrontal cortex. It’s the only portion of the brain from which the implant can safely grow--it’s the only part of his brain that suffered no damage when he removed the infected neural implant. He hopes, he hopes, he hopes he doesn’t cause it any damage, now. (The prefrontal cortex is the home of personality and behavior. Rhys is only just starting to get a grasp on who he really is; he doesn’t want to change anything now). 

Thumbs activates the implant’s temporary motor functions. The implant is programmed only to move in one direction, and once it arrives at its destination, it will never move again. Rhys can feel pressure dragging along his skull. He can’t be certain that he’s not imagining it, but the Atlas Eye’s readings indicate that the implant is, indeed, gliding toward the fold in his prefrontal cortex that Rhys marked with a hypothetical ‘X’. It’s a deep fold. Once the implant roots, it will be hidden from almost every visual sensor. It’s the best Rhys can do. He’s not a brain surgeon. He’s barely even an engineer of any caliber. 

(He’s going to melt his own brain or something, oh God, oh God).

The implant hits its mark. It hesitates. And then it roots. The brain can’t feel pain. It is a small mercy, and it still feels really weird.

Rhys programs the implant to activate. The implant clicks (the resulting sensation that rattles in Rhys’s skull is bizarre, to say the least). Then, the implant does as it was designed to do, and Rhys blacks out.

\--

When he wakes up, his skull no longer has an extra hole in it. He runs the Atlas Eye’s medical diagnostic program again, his good eye trained at the terminal screen before him. He holds his breath. The new images load over the old ones, refreshing at a rate of one per second. Rhys breathes out, a rush of relief flooding over him, warm and heady. The deep gouges in his brain tissue knit before his eyes, the dark web going orange-yellow with light as the tissue fills in once more. It won’t be perfect, he knows, but he’s almost positive that he won’t die, now. Thank all that is holy and pure for the science of medical kits. 

(Medical kit implants, directed right to the site of the injury. Atlas will make a fortune, and lives will be saved. It’s pretty win-win. Rhys feels proud.)

He gives Thumbs a high-five, and for the first time since Helios, feels like things are going his way.

\--

The headaches don’t stop coming, though. Rhys spends almost two days suffering the worst migraine in existence, praying for death. Death doesn’t come, but sleep does eventually, and when he wakes up--disoriented and tasting bile at the back of his throat--he feels almost human, again.

\--

His arm hurts. The one that isn’t there. He never made as much use of the metal prosthetic as he should have, he knows, but now he seems to be constantly reaching out and trying to grasp things with fingers that don’t exist. He has a deep, stabbing pain in his not-there wrist and experiences tight, vicious cramping in his not-there fingers, and spends hours at a time trying to work a knot out of his not-there shoulder and...it’s just stupid. 

Rhys finds it harder and harder to get out of his cot every morning. The Dome is isolated and dim. His work is difficult and thankless. His body is...his body is broken, and he did it to himself to save the goddamn world or something equally stupid and he hates it all so much that he just...he just….

He spends his days either sleeping (discordant dreams, neon static, a jeering voice in his head that won’t shut up, doesn’t shut up, will never shut up) or staring up at the trees above the Dome, seeing nothing, despite the fact that the Atlas Eye sends a steady stream of data to him every passing second. Unlike the Echo Eye, he can’t turn it off. He doesn’t want to; he might miss something. 

\--

Something in the steady, repetitive datastream (leaf, leaf, bird-thing, leaf, leaf, leaf) looks...different. Rhys sits up in alarm, the first real motion he’s made in days. His muscles protest the motion, as does his aching head, but he ignores it all in favor of focusing in on the display from the Eye.

He isn’t sure why the energy signature is showing up now, when he’s been reading nothing but trees and sparse fauna around him for months. Still, there it is, clear as day. There’s a loot box up in the trees, and it glows with an energy signature unlike any Rhys has ever seen before. 

He decides to retrieve it. Except that it’s very, very high up. Rhys is tired of heights. Why can’t everything be at ground level? Why do people insist on putting very important things so damn high up? He wastes a day trying to bully the robots into doing recon for him. There’s only one of the ‘bots that can even so much as hover (it’s a dusting ‘bot, so that makes sense), and it’s too scrawny to do much good against a solid metal loot box, even if Rhys could reprogram it to fly above its ingrained height limitation. 

Rhys dismantles the two useless robots from the Dome’s cache. He could never figure out what their core functions were and, besides, there’s plenty of scrap materials going around, should he decide to put them back together later. From those scattered parts, he builds a bulkier chassis for the dusting robot and reconfigures its flight mechanism so it will hover higher. It’s much easier work than building amazing, innovative eye-implant technology or pretending to build a cybernetic arm, and Rhys finds that he’s actually kind of enjoying it. He stops sleeping his days away, and he even works up the gumption to try and hunt one of the weird bird-things outside the Dome for supper. He screws it up and lands on his face for his trouble, sure, but it’s the thought that counts. He can hardly even register the weird aftertaste of drakefruit, anymore. 

Finally, he finishes work on the new flying retrieval robot. He decides that, like the medical brain implant, the only way to test the device is in the field. 

“Don’t let me down, buddy,” Rhys coos to the ‘bot. His voice croaks and Rhys realizes, with a shock, that he stopped talking out loud to himself over a month ago. He resolves to take up the habit again immediately--the whole pack-a-day huskiness thing doesn’t suit him. 

Lifting the robot over his head is more difficult than Rhys anticipated (he gets tired too damn easily, anymore), but he manages. With a flick of his pointer finger, he activates the ‘bot. It whirs to life and rises straight up at an impressive clip. Rhys hadn’t wasted time with intricate navigations for the robot. It went up, it went down, that was it. Later, he might tinker with the ‘bot to expand its capabilities. For now, though, up and down serves his purposes well. The bot shoots up. Its reinforced bulk hits the bottom of the suspended loot crate. The crate falls, the bot coming back down after it. Rhys steps neatly to the side as the heavy metal container lands with a thud mere inches from his toes. Whoops, that was close. 

Rhys, remembering he’d resolved to speak more, does so: “Whoops, that was close. Good job, Liftbot.”

The ‘bot doesn’t respond, because it has no advanced AI with which to do so, but Rhys imagines it feels satisfied with itself, anyway. 

Rhys allows a minute to bask in the warmth of anticipation before crouching down and opening the crate.

Crying hurts. He does it, anyway.  
\--

It’s not quite ten-million dollars’ worth, but the stash of Eridium is impressive regardless. Rhys counts the pieces twice before he can really convince himself it’s not a dream. There’s enough there to buy a new arm and pay for professional installation. It won’t be easy to find someone on Pandora he can trust, but with the kind of payout he’s just hit, it’s not impossible, either.

Hope is a beautiful thing. Rhys has missed it.

He chooses not to dwell on whose Eridium the loot crate holds. That’s a bridge he will burn when he comes to it. 

\--

Rhys deals with four vendors before he finds one who doesn’t set his internal radar (or his Atlas Eye’s outer radar) off in alarm. The man is old as a hills and smells strongly of soot, but that just increases Rhys’s personal estimation of his skills. The craftsman has experience and resources to boot. And, best of all, he expresses an immediate and sincere appreciation of Rhys’s eye.

“Like that gold shine,” the man says, huffing a bit as he raises his hammer over his head and then lets it fall back down again with a clang. “Touch o’ class.”

Rhys smiles. “Yeah, thanks. I thought it’d be good. Something different than my old ECHO.”

The man spits, though if it is meant as a commentary on ECHO Eyes or just a means by which to release some phlegm-y build up, Rhys isn’t sure. 

The arm the old man builds for him is solid, functional, and worth the money Rhys spends for it. He treks the piece right back to the Atlas Dome (cleaned up and newly fortified since he settled into it; he’s starting to think of it the old place as “home”) and tears the whole thing apart. 

With Thumbs’s assistance, Rhys plates the outer pieces all in strong, shiny chrome. He tools around the inner workings of the piece, careful not to disturb anything beyond his capacity to fix. He incorporates some additional software, retools the finger joints with some special tricks, and then carefully puts it all back together. The whole process takes a month. Rhys doesn’t mind. Patience--at least as it applies to his work--is something he understands, now. He can wait. It’s worth the wait. No shortcut solutions. Not in the Dome. 

“Well, there she is, Thumbs. What do you think?”

Thumbs is quiet on the matter. Rhys misses Loaderbot with a ferocity that surprises him. “Maybe I should build an AI, next,” he says, but he knows that’s not the next step. The next step (after he installs the arm, that is) is something bigger. It’s time to get Atlas on its feet again.

\--  
Installing the arm himself is a risk, but Pandoran hacksaw medicine is riskier, and, besides, a part of him just doesn’t want to leave Atlas alone more than necessary. 

The less that is said about the process, the better. Suffice to say, it’s not fun.

\--

When the Stranger nabs him in the desert, Rhys’s mind goes immediately to the Eridium stash. It’s been a year since he traded in the stuff for his arm (and some extra cash, besides), but it’s the most recent grievous sin on his long list of moral errors and therefore the first thing that comes to mind.

When the masked figure starts to ask about the Vault Key, well...that’s...unexpected, but Rhys plays along, hoping that his big mouth won’t get himself killed. He’s just hired the first members of his new team to help him run Atlas. It would be a very disappointing time to die.

Then Fiona is thrown into the mix and everything just goes...well, about as well as his life always has, actually.

\--

They save Gortys, and his friends are alive, and everybody lives, and Rhys feels…

Incredible.

\--

Rhys hunches over the cliffside and pukes his guts out into the shallow ravine below. He leans heavily against the sheer rock face on his right, grimacing as the rock grinds into the chrome of his arm. It won’t scratch, but it’s an unsettling sensation, like fingers on a chalkboard.

His stomach kicks and he goes to his knees this time, dry heaving until his ribs ache. 

He’d been doing so much better! Stupid, stupid (awesome) mecha-monster battle. Who knew making finger guns and climbing up craggy hills and stuff was so taxing?

“Hey, Rhys, are you seriously just going to let me go into that Vault by mys--whoa.”  
Fiona hovers above him, clearly not sure what she should do. After a silent moment of weighing her options (boy, does Rhys know that feeling), she starts to bolt. Then she stops, staring down at him as he heaves again. “Uh, I’ll be right back!” she assures, and just as quickly as she appeared she’s gone. Rhys groans and leans forward, resting his head on a clear spot of dirt. His butt is up in the air in this position, and he probably looks stupid, but he’s too whacked out to care. 

“Okay, buddy. It’s okay.” Rhys feels a hand on his back, fingers rubbing in small circles between his sweaty shoulder blades.

“Hey, Vaughn,” Rhys greets, shaky. He has dirt in his mouth, now, but it can’t taste much worse than all the other gunk that’s in there.

“Long day, huh?” Vaughn says, sympathetically. He’s talking to Rhys all slow and careful, like he’s a spooked animal. Rhys figures that’s his Father of the Children of Helios Voice. It should be condescending, but really Rhys just feels comforted. Vaughn has always had that effect on him.

Rhys, with Vaughn’s help, sits back on his butt. He feels dizzy and overcompensates, but Vaughn is behind him, so he just falls right back against his friend’s chest. “Seriously, dude, you’re so ripped,” Rhys mumbles, too disoriented to censor himself.

Vaughn laughs softly. “Came in handy, these last couple of years.”

“Shoulda exercised more, myself,” Rhys says, trying to play it all off, trying to convince his friend (and himself) that he’s just out of shape. 

Vaughn runs a finger gently around the circular base of Rhys’s new neural uplink port. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s weirdly intimate, and Rhys flinches slightly. Vaughn pulls his hand away. 

“Fiona filled me in, a little, about what happened to you just after Helios.”

“She shouldn’t have done that. I was going to tell you all about it, once things settled down.”

“I’m listening.”

Rhys yawns. “It’s not that great of a story. The ship crashed, Jack was still around, I had to do something to fix my mistakes. So I...I got rid of Jack.”

“You tore out your implants.”

“I had to. He was controlling me. He was going to use my body as a meat-suit and try to retake his old throne.”

“That was really brave, Rhys.”

Rhys huffs out a small breath. “It was stupid.”

“Yeah, it was, a little. Do you regret it?”

Rhys frowns, considering. It’s not an easy question to answer. He lies there against his friend, staring up at the darkening sky, feeling chilled and sweltering in turns. He might be getting shocky, again. It’s hard to tell. Thinking back to his confrontation with Handsome Jack always makes him feel untethered. He starts to tremble, which is embarrassing. 

Vaughn casually rests his arms over Rhys’s, not even flinching away from the cold metal of his prosthetic. It takes Rhys a second for his brain to recognize the motion as an embrace. “It’s okay, if you do.”

Rhys sighs. “I don’t regret getting rid of Jack. I was stupid to ever think that aligning with him was a good idea. It’s...hard, though, not to regret the consequences. I killed a lot of people, in that crash. And then I messed up my brain a lot. Kinda sucks.”

Vaughn makes a small sound in reply, noncommittal but also without judgement, which puts Rhys much more at ease. “I thought you’d be mad at me,” Rhys admits, “I mean, I thought you were dead. But then I thought if you weren’t dead, you’d be mad that I didn’t try to find you.”

“I was, at first, when I first saw you guys. But then I figured, you know. You probably did what you had to do to survive. I’m not going to hold that against you. I did that, too.”

“Bro, it’s weird that you have a village.”

“It’s weird that my village basically reveres you as the saviour of humankind.”

“...That, too.”

They fall into a companionable silence, watching the stars come into view. Pandora is a shitshow of a planet, but sometimes it can be astoundingly pretty.

\--

Once Rhys feels like he can function normally again, the two men scramble to their feet and make their way down to the open valley, where their friends are still clamoring over the spoils of their monster kill. Fiona and Sasha look up from an argument they are having over a shield of some kind.

“Hey. Everything, uh, ok?” Fiona asks, with remarkable tact.

Rhys nods. “Sure! You know how it is. Adrenaline rush, adrenaline crash. I’m over it.”

Sasha raises an eyebrow, apparently not buying his story any more than her sister appears to be. “You look pasty.”

Rhys tries not to take too much offense at that. “Well, you look great, so there.”

Sasha blushes. Fiona’s eye twitches. Beside him, Vaughn shifts uncomfortably. Rhys grins at them all, unrepentant. 

Fiona throws the shield in her hands at him with undue force. Rhys barely manages to catch it in time. “Uh, what--?”

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Fiona grounds out, gripping his left arm in a vice-like grip and tugging him along behind her. He’s still feeling unsteady and weak, so he has no choice but to follow.

Sasha and Vaughn look on in bemusement. 

Fiona pushes Rhys roughly behind a large rock outcropping. Still off balance, he lands harder than she’d anticipated. It knocks all the wind out of him, and she frowns. “What’s wrong with you? No, nevermind. Later. That’s not what I wanted to say to you. More important topic: What the hell do you think you’re doing with my sister?”

Rhys gapes at her. “Huh-what?”

“Sasha,” Fiona growls, poking him hard in the chest. “What are your intentions?”

Rhys blinks. “With Sasha?”

“Yes!”

Rhys frowns, mentally rewinding back a few years to when the group had all been together. Okay, sure, he thought Sasha was pretty cute, and sure they’d had a few friendly discussions during their time hunting for Gorty’s pieces but….

“I’m not--I don’t. I don’t have any intentions about--for? with?--your sister. Or anyone! Really.”

Fiona does not appear convinced. “You keep flirting with her. You kept asking about her. You cried!”

“Of course I kept asking about her. I thought she might be dead! And then she was dead! I was sad!”

“And the flirting?”

 

Rhys frowns. Had he been flirting? He isn’t sure. He talks to everyone like that. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, if you ask me, she’s still pretty stuck on August.”

This does not make Fiona’s stormy expression any less stormy.

Rhys leverages himself away from the rock behind him. He’s feeling steadier. “Uh, can I go, now?”

Fiona sighs. “Fine. But, hey. The Vault. Are we going in or what?”

Rhys thinks about that open, shimmering door. Beyond it lies the unknown, something rare and wondrous though, most likely. “No. I don’t...I don’t think I can.”

Fiona frowns, but it’s a different kind of frown than before. She looks...concerned, which is touching and weird at the same time. It’s her Big Sister face, Rhys realizes, and that makes him feel warm all over. He’s missed these people so much. His family. 

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What, because I don’t want to go into the Vault? This was never about the Vault for me, remember? I just wanted to find a Key and sell it, get my promotion like I deserved.”

“Hyperion is dead, Rhys.”

“Exactly. I don’t need to go in there.”

“You said you’re rebuilding Atlas. You really don’t think whatever is in that Vault is going to help you do that?”

“I don’t…”

“Rhys! Be honest with me. I thought you trusted me. You said as much to the Stran--er, to Loaderbot--when he asked you why you picked me over Jack at Old Haven.”

Rhys sighs. He is tired of going over this same ground with everyone he cares about. He doesn’t want to worry anyone. He doesn’t want to be branded as...fragile. 

“Look, things didn’t go so well for me at Helios, after the crash.” 

“It didn’t go well for a lot of people.”

“I know! I know. Fiona, you asked, okay? I’m trying to explain.”

“Sorry.”

Rhys gives up on standing. It’s too tiring to stay on his feet. He sinks to the ground instead, sliding down against the rock behind him, heedless of how the clay snags at the back of his coat. Fiona hesitates a moment, but then she follows suit, settling down next to him in a scramble of dust. 

“I told you and the Loaderbot what happened already.”

“You said you got rid of Jack. Not exactly detailed. I thought you liked to embellish?”

Rhys smiles ruefully. “Well, I didn’t want to detract from your sad tale of Gortys’s demise.”

“Rhys.”

He pulls his knees up and rests his head on them, looking away from her. “Jack had integrated with my cybernetics. He was taking control of me. He wanted to use me to get himself a new robot body. I had to stop him. So I took my implants out.” A short, simple overview of what it’d really taken to dismantle his arm and the ECHO Eye, but she surely doesn’t need those gruesome details. 

“So you just...yanked out your arm? And your eye?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that safe?”

Rhys snorts and looks at her. She looks pale, drawn. The concern is back, writ big on her face. He loves her, a little bit, like he loves Sasha and Vaughn and all the rest of his this makeshift family they constructed for themselves, born of desperation and a need to survive. 

“You could have died.”

“I probably should have.” He looks up at her flinch, lifting his left hand to stall her. “I mean, it’s surprising I didn’t, that’s all. It...was messy.” A weirdly succinct way to brush massive bloodloss and deep brain-tissue scarring under the rug.

“You’re patched up now, though,” Fiona hazards, not quite a question.

“Yeah. I patched myself up, like I said before.”

“How?”

Rhys grimaces. “I don’t think you want to know. It took a lot of time. A lot of luck.” He brightens. “And a lot of certified genius, honestly. This eye--I’m calling it the Atlas Eye, patent pending--can run circles around the old ECHO. Metaphorically speaking, that is.”

Fiona rolls her eyes, but she humors him. “What can it do?”

Rhys sits up, excited to share his innovations with someone that can talk back. “Well, it all started when I, uh, needed to run some medical diagnostics…”

\--

Fiona decides to go into the Vault with Sasha, instead. Rhys feels weird about it, like they are going against the flow, somehow, but he doesn’t back down. He’s in no shape to go into the Hunting business. Besides...he has a feeling anyone who walks into that Vault is going to be gone for a while. 

He stands with Fiona, Sasha, and Vaughn before the shimmering gate. For a moment the four of them just stand there, uncertain how to proceed. 

“Hey,” Vaughn says, breaking the silence. “You two take care, okay? And don’t forget--you always have a home with the Children of Helios.”

Sasha smiles. “Thanks.” She steps forward, kisses Vaughn on the cheek. Rhys feels kind of weird about it, but he can’t quite say why. 

Fiona takes her sister’s hand and tugs her back from the two men. “So. I guess you two weren’t totally useless.”

Rhys smirks. “Yeah. You, too.”

Vaughn rolls his eyes and steps forward. Despite his small size, he’s got some serious presence, and soon all four of them are pushed into a group hug, like before. “You’d better go. Vault doors wait for no Hunter.”

Sasha pulls away first, starting off at a dead run. “Meet you there, Fi!”

Fiona lets go of Rhys, chasing on her little sister’s heels. “Sasha! Dammit, we’re doing this together. Together!”

Rhys and Vaughn watch as the two women match strides and disappear through the giant doorway. For a moment they stand there, staring out, lost in memory. “They’ll be okay, right?”

Vaughn smiles. “If anyone could be okay, it’s the two of them.”

“What about us? Are we going to be okay?”

Vaughn reaches out a hand to him, just a slight lift of his fingers toward Rhys’s own, but then he seems to think better of it is and lets it drop. “Yeah, bro. After everything that we’ve been through? Anything next will be a piece of cake.”

Rhys does not quite share his friend’s (weird, new) optimism, but he smiles anyway, allowing himself--for just a moment--to believe it. “Cool.”

\--

“Do you remember when I first got the implants? The night before the installation surgery, I mean.”

“Hard to forget that, man. It took me hours to track you down, and when I finally did, there you were, reading the list of possible side effects over and over again.”

“I still have that list memorized: Mood swings, aphasia, migraines, seizures, memory loss, fatigue, decreased libido--.”

“--You never experienced any of that.”

“Not the first time, no.”

Vaughn pauses mid-motion. They’ve developed a routine over the last few days, just the two of them. While the rest of their party scattered, returning to their lives, Rhys and Vaughn found themselves not quite able to part ways. Now, they sit in Vaughn’s shack, talking while Rhys fiddles with the burnt-out mechanics of Vaughn’s watch. They used to play games on the thing, and Rhys is hopeful that with some adjustments, they can resume their forgotten game of Pong. For his part, Vaughn takes on the more practical task of cooking dinner. If he doesn’t flip that pancake again soon, though, he’s going to burn it. 

“Vaughn?” Rhys prompts, carefully. He doesn’t want to have this conversation, really, but it seems important that his friend understand what to expect, just in case. Rhys doesn’t want Vaughn to worry, but he also doesn’t want the man to suffer any nasty surprises. Rhys feels like a ticking timebomb, sometimes. 

Vaughn clears his throat and goes back to tending to his pancakes. “And this time?”

“I’ve had some time to make adjustments to the new tech. I fixed most of the big problems.”

“...But?” Vaughn flips a pancake over onto a plate. It lands with an airy splat.  
Rhys keeps his eyes fixed on the components of the watch in his hands. “There’s a lot of internal damage I can’t fix. Nerve damage and some soft-tissue scarring. That kind of thing. I’ve gotten pretty good with hardware, the last few years--I didn’t really have a choice--but the whole human biology thing is above me.”

Vaughn turns away from the hotplate. Rhys can feel him staring, but he’s not brave enough to meet his friend’s gaze. “How bad is it?”

Rhys shrugs. “‘Bad’ is such a relative term--.”

“Rhys. Come on.”

Migraines for days on end, his limbs sometimes going numb without warning, moments of time lost. Once he’d spent a whole afternoon in the Dome, unable to come up with the correct name for “wrench.” 

“No seizures,” Rhys says, brightly. “I fixed that early on.” 

Vaughn turns off the hotplate with one vicious twist of the knob. Before Rhys can quite register it, his friend stands before him, hunched over with Rhys’s head cradled gently in his hands. “Rhys,” Vaughn says, and there’s so much...his voice is just so….

Rhys feels tears prickle at his eye. “Crying hurts,” he informs his friend, sniffling. 

“I don’t think that’s a side effect,” Vaughn says, so gentle and caring, and all Rhys can think is how good it is to be around people again, people who love him. 

“No, it just sucks.” Rhys says, watery. Vaughn hands him a handkerchief. Rhys blows his nose and avoids his friend’s eyes. This is so mushy, God. “I’m so glad Yvette isn’t here to see this.”

Vaughn rolls his eyes at the mention of his second-in-command. “Yvette never was a very feelsy type of person.” 

“I am totally a feelsy type of person,” Rhys admits. 

Vaughn laughs. It’s a nice sound. “Yeah. Me, too, man.” 

Rhys sniffs again. “Uh, so. Can I have a pancake?”

Vaughn gives him two pancakes, with some kind of berry-based syrup that beats out drakefruit any day of the week.

The first time they kiss, Rhys’s mouth is still sticky with that syrup, and he’ll never taste those sweet, red berries again without thinking back to this moment. He may be the new rising star in Atlas tech, soon enough, and Vaughn may be the benevolent ruler of a hoard of former office drones, set with a homegrown army right at his fingertips, but there, in Vaughn’s makeshift kitchen, they’re the same close friends they’ve always been...with a little extra.

For the first time in ages, Rhys feels truly human, again, and he likes it.


End file.
